This book draws on the latest scholarship and archival research to examine the story of the Soviet Union and race. It looks at how the Soviet Union's antiracist campaigns attracted interest from Black radicals, activists, and intellectuals and how many of these individuals sought to experience the Soviet Union firsthand because of the Soviet claims to racial egalitarianism and Moscow's stated support for the movements for racial justice and anticolonialism.
Maxim Matusevich places special emphasis on the promises and unresolved dilemmas of Soviet internationalism and official antiracism, as well as their complicated legacy in the post-Soviet period. Black Encounters with the Soviet Union makes extensive use of individual case studies, including luminaries like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and W.E.B. Du Bois, to identify the points of contact and the inherent tensions between ideological aspirations and the pragmatic demands of foreign policy. Furthermore, the book brings attention to the impact of Soviet antiracism on the Soviet society, where it functioned both as a vehicle of ideological conditioning and, somewhat counterintuitively, of cultural and political subversion.

List of Illustrations
Introduction: Are the Russians Even White?
1. Buoyed by the Rising Tide of Color: Revolutionary Anti-Racism and Black Sojourns in the Prewar Soviet Union
2. A Love Story: Paul Robeson and the Soviet Union
3. The Black Atlantic and the Iron Curtain: African Students as Soviet Moderns
4. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Angela Davis as a Soviet Icon
5. Closing the Circle: Do Black Lives Matter in post-Soviet Spaces?
Bibliography
Index